I found this to be an excellent introduction to the subject, with clear explanations and extremely good organisation of the material. Examples build on each other in a logical fashion and make the pure mathematics concrete by using genuine scientific applications. The subject itself is fascinating and surprisingly mathematically tractable. The early chapters could be handled by anyone with A-level mathematics. Infrequent references to esoteric subjects like point-set topology are made for the sake of rigour but in fact can be totally ignored without loss of practical understanding of the techniques. Those needing more advanced material in any particular area will find adequate references.